Event
March | Monica Brewster Evening: Maria Lind
March | Monica Brewster Evening: Maria Lind
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Tuesday 10 March | 6:00pm - 7:30pm
General: $17:50, Friends of the Gallery: $13, Students: Free
What might it mean to ‘dig where you stand’?
For the first event in our 2026 Monica Brewster Series, we are delighted to welcome Maria Lind, who joins us in person from 17,500 kilometres away in the Swedish Arctic. Lind is Director of the Kin Museum of Contemporary Art in Kiruna, the northernmost museum in Sweden, located within Indigenous Sámi territories.
Lind is internationally recognised for her art-centric curatorial and educational work, which often centers on experimental, place-based approaches and a sustained attentiveness to the people and environments she works alongside. Her practice brings a depth of experience shaped by diverse contexts, long-term collaborations, and a commitment to responsive ways of working.
For Aotearoa audiences, and for Taranaki in particular, Lind’s visit offers an opportunity to reflect on how creative practice emerges from and is shaped by the places we each call home.
Her extensive experience and perspective will resonate with the many artists, educators, community practitioners, and activists who are engaged in grounded, responsive, and locally held work.
Together, we are invited to consider what it might mean, in our own Region, to ‘dig where we stand.’
Maria Lind is a curator, writer and educator from Stockholm, currently director at Kin Museum of Contemporary Art, Kiruna. She was counsellor of culture at Sweden’s embassy in Moscow (2020–2023), director of Tensta konsthall (2011–2018), Bard College’s curatorial program (2008–2010), Iaspis (2005–2007), Kunstverein München (2002–2004), and co-curator of Manifesta 2 (1998). She curated the 11th Gwangju Biennale (2016), Future Light, Vienna Biennale (2015), and co-curated the 2019 Art Encounters Biennial in Timisoara. In 2009 she received the Walter Hopps Award. Tensta Museum (2021) and The New Model (2020) reflect long-term projects, both published with Sternberg Press.
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Welcome to the 2026 Monica Brewster Evening Speaker Series — a year shaped by visionaries who remind us that dreaming is both a personal act and a collective experience.
This year, we’re thinking about visionary dreams not as distant ideals, but as layered conversations: shaped by place, ancestry, lived experience, and the work of imagining otherwise.
Each speaker brings a distinct perspective on what emerges when communities, artists, thinkers, and leaders choose to dream with clarity, courage, and care. Maria Lind invites us to consider what it means to ‘dig where we stand’ and to understand creative practice through the ground it grows from; Tusiata Avia shows us how truth-telling, poetry, and performance can unsettle power and carve space for vulnerability; Toeolesulusulu Damon Salesa opens a window onto the Moana as a site of deep history and visionary future-making; Vince Ropitini demonstrates how design guided by mātauranga Māori can carry ancestral narratives into global contexts and Leki Jackson-Bourke with the Lalaga Youth Ambassadors reveal how rangatahi dreams can reshape regional, cultural, and artistic imaginaries.
Across the series, audiences are invited to consider how dreaming can be relational, grounded, and deeply local — as well as expansive enough to hold global entanglements.
As we gather for conversations that illuminate what becomes possible when we listen to where we stand, and to one another - Join us!
